Santigold Kicks Off Transmission LA

Transmission LA, curated by Mike D of the Beastie Boys, is a multi-disciplinary festival that will be the meeting point for the Los Angeles art and music community. The sequel to the series of festivals that premiered in Berlin last year with curator and fashion designer Raf Simons, the 17-day collaborative festival includes work by Roy Choi, Benjamin Jones, Mike Mills,Tom Sachs, Public Fiction, and additional artists and musicians. Tomorrow night Santigold opens the festival tonight at The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Transmission LA will be on view until May 6.

The Illustrations of Shia LaBeouf

"Shia [LaBeouf] is in some ways an art rapist," says Marilyn Manson.  Who knew the actor was such the consummate artist and publisher. LaBeouf says he "is obsessed with the history of visual culture" and puts out around 10 books a year with his publishing imprint The Campaign Book.  Right now the modest, but impressive catalogue includes graphic novels by himself like Let's Fucking Party and Cyclical, as well as books by Marilyn Manson and Kid Kudi. Above is an illustration by LeBeouf himself from Cyclical.

Fire Walk with Me Group Exhibition

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An exhibition honoring the 20th anniversary of David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at the Copro Gallery at Bergamont Station in Los Angeles will be on view April 21 at the  featuring rare, unreleased music from "Twin Peaks" and a special DJ set by Dean Hurley, David Lynch's engineer and musical collaborator on his album "Crazy Clown Time." On view April 21 until May 12 at Copro Gallery, Bergamont Station, 2525 Michigan Ave , Unit T5, Santa Monica , CA.

Dark Sky

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On 6 June 2012 the second and the last transit of Venus of the century will occur. Departing from this extraordinary phenomenon, the Adam Art Gallery, in New Zealand, presents the exhibition Dark Sky which delves into the relationship between photography and astronomy to examine the intriguing photographic consequences and new territories discovered from capturing the skies. The exhibition has been timed to coincide with the 2012 Transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event when Venus passes between the Earth and the sun. The exhibition will be complemented by a public programme, including talks by scientists, artists and writers, including the German and New Zealand poets who have been commissioned by the International Institute of Modern Letters and the New Zealand Goethe-Institut to write about the Transit of Venus. Dark Sky will be on view from May 1 to June 8, at the Adam Art Gallery Victoria University, Gate 3, Kelburn Parade.

Doug Aitken's Song 1

One of the most important artist's working today is without a doubt Doug Aitken. From photography, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, and installations Aitken's work is a truly unique and distinctive voice of this century. On view now at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., Aitken's multimedia exhibition, entitled Song 1, is a 360 degree projection of films onto the exterior museum set to the soundtrack of the 193os jazz standard reinterpreted by the likes of LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, Beck, Devendra Banhart, No Age and more. Song 1 "will illuminate the entire facade of the Hirshhorn’s iconic building, transforming it into 'liquid architecture' and an urban soundscape. Using eleven high-definition video projectors, Aitken will seamlessly blend imagery to envelop the Museum's exterior, creating a work that redefines cinematic space." Doug Aitken: SONG 1 will be on view until May 13, 2012.

Keith Haring's Notebooks

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The Keith Haring Foundation has been scanning Keith Haring's journals dating from middle school to 1989 – some of which are featured in the show of works at the Brooklyn Museum and a page will be post each day for the duration of the show through July 8, 2012. The show is the first large scale survey of the artist's early works.

Crumb Retrospective in Paris

His LSD-inspired heroes, rampant sex and frontal assaults on political correctness made comic artist Robert Crumb an icon of US counter-culture, but why on earth, he wonders, put his work on show in a museum? Crumb's cult universe, from hippy-era characters like "Fritz the Cat" to his cartoon take on the Bible, is on show -- uncensored -- until August at Paris' Museum of Modern Art, hosting the largest-ever retrospective of his work. Many of the 600 works on display are original drawings shown for the first time, loaned by a handful of private collectors in Europe and the United States. Crumb: De l’Underground à la Genèse will be on view at the Paris Museum of Modern Art until August 19, 2012.

Made in America

This Friday at the Roll Up Gallery in San Francisco will present Matthew Henri's solo exhibition of new works entitled Made in America.  Using his unique silkscreen method "Henri will present portraits of bank robbers and wanted posters, prostitutes of the Barbary Coast in San Francisco’s now defunct red light district, old whiskey bottles, railroad ties, public hangings, along with other haunting ephemeral nostalgia. By digging further than most, culling and obtaining imagery from obscure books and libraries, with exhaustive research, and artifacts such as nudie playing cards found at seedy liquor stores on the outskirts of the Las Vegas desert, Henri has created an extremely visceral and heartbreaking portrait of an American landscape...." Made in America will be on view from April 13 to April 29 at Roll Up Gallery, 161 Erie Street, San Francisco. 

The Shaping of New Visions

Valie Export, Einkreisung (Encirclement) from the series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations). 1976.

The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, on view this month at the MOMA in New York, covers the period from 1910 to today, offers a critical reassessment of photography's role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements—with a special emphasis on the medium's relation to Dada, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Constructivism, New Objectivity, Conceptual, and Post-Conceptual art—and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. The shaping of what came to be known as "New Vision" photography bore the obvious influence of "lens-based" and "time-based" works. El Lissitzky best summarized its ethos: "The new world will not need little pictures," he wrote in The Conquest of Art (1922). "If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema." The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary art from April 18 to April 29, 2013.

Giverny

The Hole gallery in New York presents the exhibition Giverny, a collaboration between E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler. The artists created photographic works in the famous French gardens built and immortalized in paint by Claude Monet, and will be exhibiting them for the first time here on the Bowery. Playboy.com has generously funded this massive exhibition, for the duration of which the Hole will be transformed into a living, breathing garden—with a lily-padded pond traversed by Monet’s signature green Japanese arched bridge, and scattered with the indigenous plants he is famous for painting. The walls of the exhibition will be printed with the almost claustrophobically green willow trees that surround this historic French site, and your first step into the gallery will be onto grass. Giverny will be on view until April 24 at the Hole Gallery.

Earthling

Janet Werner’s work focuses on the invention of fictional characters based on found images from popular culture including models, celebrities, dolls and figurines. The paintings operate within and against the genre of portraiture, taking anonymous female figures and imbuing them with fictional personalities. For Werner, the process of painting is a way of investigating the iconic power of the image, invoking imagination, memory, and projection to invest the anonymous figures with human subjectivity and emotion. The final paintings are composite portraits that retain aspects of the original while also representing notions of transformation, innocence and loss. Janet Werner's Earthling will show at Parisian Laundry from March 29 until April 28.

Robert Carrithers: The Groovy Dada Lounge Revisited

Prague – On view now at the Fotograf Gallery in Prague: rediscovered photographs by Robert Carrithers of Basquiat, Haring, the New York scene in the 1980s and the infamous Club 57.“One staircase led to heaven the other to hell” says Robert Carrithers of a building in New York’s St. Mark’s Place Street, number 57. The building whose basement housed, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Club 57 – a creative laboratory for all non-conformists and free-thinkers from the East Village – actually belonged to the central offices of the Polish Catholic Church. The Groovy Dada Lounge Revisited will be on view until April 20 at the Fotograf Gallery in Prague, Školská 28, Prague 1.

Walking Piece

Walking Piece, 1966 / Image courtesy: Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / © Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama Studio inc.

Yayoi Kusama in one of her performance art pieces entitled Walking Piece. Stay tuned for an interview and more photos of Yayoi Kusama in the upcoming issue of AUTRE - out this week. Be sure to sign up for the newsletter to find a copy!

Parra

With its vibrant color, curvaceous lines, and eccentric, distinctive imagery, the bold and playful work of Dutch graphic artist Parra has garnered a substantial cult following since it first appeared in the 1990s. Parra's cartoonlike, hybridized characters and free-form typography have become iconic, while his hand-drawn approach to graphic design has landed him high-profile collaborations with companies like Nike and InCase. For this exhibition, his first in a U.S. museum, Parra is taking over SFMOMA's second-floor landing with an expansive mural that showcases his irrepressible post-Pop design style. On view until July 29, 2012.